At what age are you happiest?
According to a series of seven surveys most people reach peak happiness in their early 20s.
Happiness drops down from then on, reaching its lowest point in middle-age, only to rise again around retirement.
The results were published in a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Around 1.3 million randomly selected people from 51 different countries, took part in one of seven surveys.
Respondents were asked questions about their psychological health and well-being. All participants were between the ages of 20 and 90.
The data formed a U-shaped graph. So far, there’s been no explanation as to why life contentment is shaped like this. Though satisfaction sinks from age 20 onward, things pick up again around 50, and throughout retirement and old age people report ever-growing happiness.
Are you retired? Have you become happier since retirement? What age do you think you were the happiest in your life?
Even in the case of wealthy nations some academics have argued that the U-shaped curve is a statistical illusion. (Economists, incidentally, figure prominently in the debate over the U-shaped curve.) Perhaps, for example, unhappier people simply die younger.
There’s certainly evidence of a correlation between wellbeing and mortality. A new UK studythat followed more than 9,000 people in their 60s for eight years found a death rate of 29% for those in the bottom quarter for happiness. For the most contented 25%, on the other hand, the rate was just 9%.
Some of that stark difference can be attributed to physical health. The UK study found that older people with illnesses such as coronary heart disease, arthritis, and chronic lung disease were likely to have lower levels of wellbeing. Moreover, it may be that happiness helps prevent people falling ill. Yet even after controlling for initial physical health, wealth, education, and depression, happiness was still associated with a 30% reduction in the risk of death.
The link between happiness and mortality may be skewing the statistics to a degree, but the overall death rate isn’t nearly high enough to account entirely for the U-shaped curve. Perhaps more subtle biases are at work. Perhaps researchers haven’t always fully grasped the complexity lurking in the large sample data. What happens for example when you factor in the possibility that the people getting happier in the studies are essentially the same individuals who began life with high levels of contentment? After all, happy people are more likely to experience positive life events (career success, for instance, or great relationships), which in turn bring even greater happiness.
When you correct for this effect, say economists Paul Frijters and Tony Beatton, the U-shaped curve disappears; what we see instead is an overall gradual decline in happiness with age. Not everyone, of course, stays in a longitudinal survey; inevitably, a percentage of participants drop out. When Frijters and Beatton controlled for this factor they found that the happiness shape changes again. This time the data formed a wave: happiness remained fairly steady up to around age 55, at which point it increased, before falling sharply at about age 75.
The U-shaped curve theory has its dissenters. Yet evidence for its existence in the prosperous west keeps on coming, most recently in a longitudinal study of the general population in Britain, Australia, and Germany that tracked individual changes in wellbeing. So if it’s accurate, what are the reasons?
The short answer is that no one knows, not least because the surveys that generate the data are less well suited to elicit explanations. This isn’t to say that theories haven’t been suggested. Two are particularly popular in the scientific literature. The first is economic: essentially, it all boils down to the effect of work on our wellbeing. The downward curve of contentment begins as we enter employment in early adulthood and accelerates as work takes up more and more of our time in mid-life. But we reap the rewards as we enter our 50s – established in a career, financially secure and with the kids having finally flown the nest, we now have time to enjoy the fruits of our frenetic mid-life labour.
Guardian Scientific